Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Latest images from Phoenix Mars lander contain surprises

The Mars Odyssey spacecraft has again successfully transmitted data from the Phoenix lander back to Earth, following the newly arrived lander's first full day of operations on Mars. Pictures are now streaming down via NASA's Deep Space Network and can be viewed online in their unprocessed state.

Earlier, mission managers indicated that taking more pictures would be a high priority. "We want to look around and see as much of the surroundings as possible so that we can figure out where we are," said principal investigator Peter Smith.

Shortly after landing on Sunday, Phoenix took images of its solar panels and landing pad to verify a successful touchdown. It also provided a glimpse of the landscape from the north-facing side of the spacecraft.

The new batch of images is expected to contain south-facing views. Eventually, all the landscape images will be assembled into a giant colour panorama of the site.

Images of the ground around the spacecraft will be used to help create a 3D model of the surface. That model will be essential for the robot arm to position itself correctly when it starts excavating soil around the site, which could occur as early as next week.

Here are a few of the most interesting images so far, along with New Scientist's very unofficial commentary:

1) What do you think - is the white object in the left side of the field:

A. Part of Phoenix's landing hardwareB. A boulderC. An abandoned snow mobile?

2) The lander's stereo imager looks down towards the sunlit ground and sees its own shadow. Does that mean 6 million more years of winter?

3) This image is part of a sequence intended to help engineers understand why the "bio barrier" around the lander's robot arm did not seem to retract fully after landing. Mission managers say this will not affect the arm's deployment - but they are still curious to know why the retraction didn't work perfectly.

4) The low hill in the distance may eventually be useful in helping to pinpoint the lander's position on the surface.

5) This image appears to show the tip of the Canadian weather mast. If it's working properly, expect a mixture of snow and sleet in tomorrow's forecast. (Just kidding Canada!)

6) Earlier pictures show rocks in patches around the lander. This view seems to continue the trend. Scientists are keen to study the rocks in relation to the shallow troughs that separate the surface "polygons". They may have collected in the trough through a process of freezing and thawing known as cryoturbation. Or, then again, maybe not.

Friday, May 16, 2008

Was Einstein religious?

Some of the most famous quotes attributed to him suggest he was - namely, "God does not play dice with the universe."

But a handwritten letter that the great physicist wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind in 1954, a year before his death at age 76, suggests he had serious problems with organised religion. "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends, which are nevertheless pretty childish," he wrote.

That little-known letter was auctioned off in London yesterday for a record 170,000 British pounds - four times more than any other Einstein letter has fetched.

It was not the first time Einstein had criticised the social construction of religion, including the notion of a judgmental creator. In his book The World as I See It, Einstein says: "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves."

But in the same book he said he understood the motivation to be religious, in a passage I think is quite poetic:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

But the idea that there might be intelligent life beyond Earth doesn't easily fit into the Christian worldview. According to the Bible, God created Earth as the centre of the universe and men in his own image. Would the Good Book's credibility be compromised by the discovery of alien life? I can just imagine the higher-ups at the Vatican pacing nervously as SETI began searching the sky for ET signals and surveys turned up planet after planet outside the solar system - some of which might be able to host life.

In a clever manoeuvre, the Vatican has pre-empted the threat an alien discovery would pose to Christianity. Now they say they won't be the least bit surprised should we make contact with our "extraterrestrial brothers".

And why should they? According to Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, the Bible is chock full of references to aliens. In Intelligent Life in the Universe, published by the Catholic Truth Society in 2005, Consolmagno wrote:

"There are, unquestionably, nonhuman intelligent beings in the Bible. At least one group of such creatures is familiar to us all: angels. But are the 'holy ones', those 'in the sky', the 'morning stars', and 'heavenly beings' mentioned in Psalms and elsewhere references to angels? Or do they refer to some other kind of life beyond our knowledge?"

"If you're really eager to find a reference to extraterrestrials in the Bible," he writes, "you can't do better than John 10:14-16. 'I am the Good Shepherd . . . I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also . . . so there will be one flock, one Shepherd.'"

Other sheep? Aliens, obviously! And it sounds like they are on their way.

The existence of ET life does leave Consolmagno with some head-scratchers. Are they burdened with original sin? Is there a "cosmic Adam" that predates his Earthly clone? Does one baptise an alien?

When little green men finally make themselves known, the Christians will be ready for them. After all, as Consolmagno says, "Having a soul has nothing to do with how many arms or legs or tentacles you have."

Monday, May 12, 2008

Is Japan trying to militarise space?

A new law expected to be passed by the Japanese parliament will allow the country to have a military presence in space for the first time.

But don't panic. Japan isn't gearing up to make space into a shooting gallery. The country wants to bolster its space operations so it can keep a wary eye on North Korea and China, and so it can develop its own space industry.

Japan has been feeling uneasy and bolstering its defenses in recent years - in December, for example, it launched a sea-based interceptor that destroyed a test missile over the Pacific in the first test of the country's missile-defence system, which is based on US technology. North Korea sparked the unease by pressing for the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. China's anti-satellite test last year only added to the anxiety.

Yet the resolution that established Japan's space agency in 1969 limited it to peaceful purposes. When Japan decided it needed a spy satellite to watch North Korea, for example, the government had to go through a series of contortions to satisfy its own rules - including having the office of the prime minister operate the satellite.

The new bill will allow Japan's Ministry of Defense to deploy satellites for non-aggressive missions, including communications, surveillance and weather observations, as is routinely done by the military agencies of other countries. Industry is backing the move as a step towards creating a powerful space industry. The government is expected to follow by establishing a central space policy council to develop a national space strategy.

"This is a major change in Japanese space policy," says space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University in Washington, DC, US.

For many years, scientists and engineers have run the country's space programme for their own purposes. Logsdon told New Scientist that the change will "allow Japan to carry out military programmes as long as they are non-aggressive, and raise the profile of space within Japanese government".

Ideally that would allow Japan to develop a more ambitious and more coherent space programme. But will that really work? And in the long term, might efforts to improve the country's defences lead Japan to consider putting interceptors in orbit? Where will this "defensive" strategy end?

Friday, May 09, 2008

Stephen Colbert talks to space station astronaut

Faux news anchor Stephen Colbert took one giant leap for comedy yesterday when he spoke with Garrett Reisman, an astronaut currently living on the International Space Station.

Reisman held his own against Colbert, who asked him whether his duties on the station essentially made him "a janitor with a PhD". I was particularly delighted with Reisman's test of whether it's true that in space, no one can hear you scream.

Watch the full interview below, and if you want even more space-related tomfoolery, click on the second clip to see Colbert talk to Hayden Planetarium director Neil de Grasse Tyson about what it takes to be an astrophysicist.

Should NASA send humans on satellite launchers?

The US could quickly regain its ability to launch astronauts into space after the 2010 retirement of the space shuttles by flying them up on rockets normally used to carry satellites, a Senate committee was told on Wednesday.

The space shuttle fleet is scheduled to retire in 2010, and the Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule meant to replace it are not expected to be online until 2015, leaving the US with a gap in its ability to send humans into space.

NASA's current plan is to buy more Soyuz flights from Russia to transport its astronauts to the space station during the gap. But at a hearing of a US Senate committee on space and aeronautics on Wednesday, concerns were raised about the prices Russia might charge the US for this, and how a potentially difficult relationship between the two countries in the future might affect things.

Some people have proposed accelerating the development of Ares and Orion to narrow the gap, a move that would require an injection of billions of dollars in extra funding.

Dickman told the committee that NASA should consider converting rockets normally used for launching satellites so that they can gain a "human rating" - making them usable for transporting humans.

The Atlas V and Delta IV rockets in particular have "a very proven track record", Dickman said. He said he thinks the Atlas V or Delta IV could be human rated for less than the price of a shuttle flight.

Senator Bill Nelson, who chairs the committee that held the hearing, said he is told the cost would be between $500 million and $1 billion. "The question is, where are we going to get the money?"

"The same question of where you're going to get the money is the question if you try to accelerate Constellation," Dickman replied.

But Eugene Kranz, who was a top NASA official for the Gemini and Apollo programmes and is now retired from the agency, told the committee that human rating existing rockets is not as easy as it sounds.

NASA converted the Titan rocket and an earlier version of the Atlas rocket for flying astronauts to space for the Mercury and Apollo programmes, respectively. But he said his involvement in human rating those rockets taught him that this option is attractive on paper, but can require bigger modifications than expected.

"They were expensive programmes that took about a year-and-a-half each to accomplish their objectives," he said. The simplest crew capsules that NASA has used were the Mercury capsules, he said, and even those took three years to design, build, and prepare for flight.

"So I don't see that this helps close [the] gap," he said. "I see it as ? a diversion from the basic plan that you've got," he said, namely having Orion and Ares replace the space shuttle and eventually also provide transportation to the Moon.

If there's one thing that is certain in spaceflight, whether human or robotic, it's that things always take longer and cost more than expected. So in the end, I'm not sure how much human rating Atlas V or Delta IV would help in closing the gap.

But there is a chance it will happen anyway. SpaceDev is considering using the Atlas V rocket in combination with its Dreamchaser capsule as part of its plan to offer NASA commercial transportation of astronauts to the space station. And Bigelow Aerospace and Lockheed Martin are in talks about human rating the Atlas V for transporting people to the commercial space stations Bigelow intends to loft.

Aerodynamics expert David Caughey of Cornell says that is just what is expected - the looping paths are the result of uneven forces on the curved devices by the air they travel through - not the influence of gravity.

I think it's amazing that - at least in this video - the boomerang missed hitting the sides of the Harmony node, where Doi threw it, or for that matter, his own head. I had much less positive results last week while performing some aerodynamic tests on a Frisbee.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Astronaut recalls going ballistic

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson has painted a dramatic picture of her return journey to Earth from the International Space Station on 19 April, when her crew's Soyuz capsule took an unexpected trajectory that gave the astronauts a very rough ride.

During re-entry, the capsule switched to "ballistic re-entry mode". This set the craft on a much steeper, more direct trajectory to Earth than intended and it landed 475 kilometres away from the intended site.

Whitson described the ordeal today during press interviews at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. For one "very long" minute, she said, the astronauts suffered forces of 8.2 times normal gravity - nearly double the force they'd expect on a normal descent.

She compared it to having several people sitting on her chest. "It was pretty stressful just trying to breathe - I could also feel my face getting squished back," Whitson said. Of the landing, she added: "Everyone had told me to kind of expect a car crash at the end. I'd say that was a pretty accurate description."

On the ground, a hand reached into the capsule and Whitson assumed the rescue forces had arrived. But she was actually helped out by some local folks who had spotted the capsule and driven over in their truck. One spoke to Russian crew member Yuri Malenchenko.

"They asked Yuri where the boat came from," said Whitson. "He's like - what boat? They were referring to the capsule. It took him a long time to explain that we actually had been in space."

It's not yet clear why the ballistic mode kicked in. It's a kind of back-up plan in the event of certain system failures, and it has triggered twice before, in October last year and in 2003. The current best guess is that on the last two occasions, it occurred because a propulsion module attached to the landing capsule failed to separate on re-entry at the right time.

These descents have fuelled fears that the Soyuz is unsafe. But Whitson stressed that until engineers conclusively pinpoint the fault, it's impossible to say whether the crew was in grave danger at any point.

"There's an old pilot saying - any landing you can walk away from is a good one," she said. "That probably applies here."

A team of Russian engineers has begun an investigation and Whitson is confident they'll get to the bottom of it. "They have no desire to kill their astronauts or cosmonauts any more than we do," she said.

During Whitson's latest six-month spaceflight, she was the first female commander of the space station. She has also clocked up 377 days in space, the longest for any US astronaut.